A few other silk stuffs of the period are more obviously imbued with the spirit of Greece and Rome, and these may have been woven in Syria. The chief among them, with a pattern of Nereids riding on sea-monsters, is in the church of Notre-Dame de Valere at Sion in Switzerland. Another remarkable example, with a leopard attacking a bowman, is in the treasury of Sens cathedral.
One of the finest of all existing early silk stuffs has a pattern of large circles with representations of the Annunciation and the Nativity (Plate V., fig. 3). It was found in the Cappella Sancta Sanctorum in Rome, and it is now in the Vatican museum. An other fragmentary silk of great interest, at Sens, represents the story of the patriarch Joseph. A few silk stuffs with Christian subjects have been found in Egypt, as well as a far larger number of Persian origin. Among the latter, those with bowmen on horseback shooting arrows behind them are typically Persian.
Sassanian influence persisted long after Persia had been over run by the Mohammedans. It is very plainly seen in two remark able silk stuffs which were carried to Germany in early mediaeval times. One is in the church of St. Ursula at Cologne. It shows a Sassanian king riding on a griffin and slaying a mythical beast. In the other, found in the neighbourhood of Troves, a Sassanian king holds aloft a lion cub which he has snatched from a lioness. This exploit is told of Bahram Gor. The silk is now in the Berlin museum. The most remarkable Persian silk weaving of these times was found in the year 1920 in the church at Saint Josse sur-Mer near Boulogne, whence it was transferred to the Louvre (Plate VIII., fig. I). It has a large design of elephants, and a string of Bactrian camels for a border. An inscription in Arabic characters indicates the province of Khurasan as the place of origin, and approximately the year A.D. 96o as the date.
(A.D. 218-222) is said to have been the first emperor to wear a robe entirely of silk, and Aurelian (27o-275) declined to allow his wife a silk mantle because of its high cost: Silk-weaving was already carried on at Constantinople in the 4th century, but the industry cannot have been of much impor tance until the eggs of the silkworm were surreptitiously brought over by Persian monks from China in the reign of Justinian (527– 565), as Procopius relates, and the long-guarded secret of the Chinese was exposed.
Constantinople was situated at the junction of two continents, and as it was the entrepot of the trade between Europe and Asia, the influence of the East was paramount there. The emperors maintained their own weaving school in the capital, and some of the stuffs were intended solely for the use of the emperor and the court. We learn a little about this from Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, who went to Constantinople in the year 968. He bought some silk stuffs there for Otto I., but five purple stuffs were con fiscated by the officers of the customs, on the plea that they were only to be worn by the Byzantines. The bishop protests that he had seen as good stuffs in the West, brought by the merchants of Venice and Amalfi, and he asks why he, a bishop and an emperor's ambassador, should be treated as no better than a Venetian mer Three very remarkable Byzantine silk weavings are of such his torical importance that a brief description of them must be given. The first was found in the shrine of St. Anne in the abbey church of SiegbL'rg. Two lions in profile advance towards one another. Between them is a Greek inscription to the following effect: "Under Romanus and Christophorus, our most Christian rulers." These two emperors ruled jointly at Constantinople from 921 to 931. The two lions with the intervening inscription cover a length of about five feet. Perhaps it was a stuff of this kind which formed the subject of Liutprand's complaint. The second silk is similar, but the inscription refers to Constantine and Basil, whose joint rule lasted from 976 to 1025. It was found in a church in the Lower Rhine district, and pieces are now in the Berlin, Thisseldorf and Crefeld museums.